As part of their coverage of the border fence debate, CNN decided to reach out to San Diego’s KUSI-TV to ask what locals think about the barrier separating their little chunk of America from Mexico.

The end result was this 40-second segment posted Thursday detailing exactly what happened.

“A sign of the times in this debate on the shutdown,” anchor Anna Laurel says. “CNN asked if KUSI would provide a reporter to offer our local view of the debate, especially to learn if the wall works in San Diego.”

KUSI is an independent local news station in California. CNN probably expected someone to come on and tell them how the wall was a crime against humanity and it was a waste of money.

They weren’t going to get that.

“KUSI offered our own Dan Plante, who’s reported many times that the wall is not an issue here,” anchor Sandra Maas said.

“In fact, most officials believe that it is effective. The issue we face is the migrants and the debate over their treatment.”

This would have been an interesting segment — Plante, certainly not offering a take that CNN wasn’t used to, spurring some conversation on a network that’s not necessarily known to view the wall with any great kindness.

I say, of course, “would have been.” It didn’t happen for reasons that aren’t going to shock you.

“Now, knowing this, CNN declined to have us on our programs,” Laurel says, “which often present the wall as not required in other places like the stretch of the Texas border that the president visited earlier today.

The 2018 TIBCO NOW Conference has wrapped up, but its impact continues to positively affect our community. While we hope attendees from all over the world left Las Vegas feeling inspired, we here at TIBCO are also inspired by our conference attendees. Thanks to the generosity of conference participants, TIBCO was able to donate more than $ 20,000 to charity.

In closing another successful TIBCO NOW, it is important to highlight that a core value of TIBCO’s culture is giving back to our local communities. At this year’s conference in Las Vegas, the#TIBCOSPIRIT team created The Donation Wall, which gave TIBCO NOW participants the opportunity to do just that. When conference attendees arrived at the event, they had the option to either receive their giveaway ‘swag bag’ or donate the value of the bag and its contents toCode.org, a charity chosen by #TIBCOSPIRIT.

In opting to donate to Code.org, conference attendees helped provide disadvantaged students and underrepresented minorities an opportunity to succeed in computer science—an action that exemplifies the spirit of TIBCO. Additionally, donors were able to add their name to the Donation Wall, a display located in the TIBCO NOW Technology Hub.

More than 200 individuals chose to contribute their giveaway to charity. With a promise to match the amount collected from donors, TIBCO is proud to announce that a total of $ 20,800 was donated to Code.org following the conference.

A conference participant adds her name to the Donation Wall at TIBCO NOW

Code.org was chosen as the charity recipient for its commitment to improving access to computer science programs in schools. Code.org specifically designs computer science courses to engage women and minorities in order to improve diversity in the tech industry. To date, more than 30 million K-12 students around the world have enrolled in coding courses through the organization. Of those students, 45 percent are female and 48 percent are underrepresented minorities. With the vision of ensuring every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science, participants couldn’t help but be inspired by the organization’s cause.

Thank you to all who attended TIBCO NOW and opted to donate their giveaway to charity. For more information on how to donate to Code.org, please visitCode.org/donate. For every dollar you give, one student can learn computer science.

We look forward to seeing you atTIBCO NOW 2019, as our three-city conference tour heads to Singapore (April 3-4), Chicago (June 12-13), and London (September 25-26).

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg will exec produce and direct the comedy from ‘Happy Endings’ creator David Caspe and Jordan Cahan.

House of Lies star Don Cheadle is returning to Showtime.

Following a lengthy deal-making period, the premium cable network has tapped Cheadle and Girls alum Andrew Rannells to star in comedy pilot Ball Street, from Happy Endings creator David Caspe and Jordan Cahan and exec produced and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

Ball Street kicks off on Oct. 19, 1987 — aka Black Monday, the day of the worst stock market crash in the history of Wall Street. The potential series will explore who caused it as it revolves around a group of outsiders who take on Wall Street.

The comedy is a co-production between Showtime and Sony Pictures Television, where Rogen and Goldberg as well as Caspe are under overall deals.

Cheadle, who won a Golden Globe and scored four Emmy nominations for Showtime comedy House of Lies, stars as Rod “The Jammer” Jaminski, a self-educated, self-made, self-destructive master of the universe whose firm the financial press called, “The L.A. Raiders of corporate raiders.” Rannells, a two-time Tony nominee, plays Blair Shmerman, a fresh-out-of-Wharton trading prodigy whose pure heart will struggle to survive Wall Street (from both a metaphoric and cocaine standpoint). Jammer’s top lieutenant, Dawn Darcy, has yet to be cast. Darcy is the first female head trader on the street, who’ll ride the second wave of feminism through a sea of horny millionaires.

Caspe and Cahan (My Best Friend’s Girl) will serve as showrunners. Production on the pilot will begin in February.

“When the global economy incinerates itself, people always wonder why. Ball Street is a dream project rising from the ashes of that disaster,” said Showtime CEO David Nevins. “In Don Cheadle and Andrew Rannells, we have two of the most dynamic performers in the world today — the question is which one of them lit the match. With Seth, Evan, David and Jordan at the helm, we are primed for the launch of something memorable.”

Ball Street, which is being redeveloped from a script at Showtime a few years ago, marks the latest foray for Rogen and Goldberg, who also exec produce AMC comic book take Preacher and next have Hulu comedy Future Man. They also have FX comedy pilot Singularity in the works. They’re repped by UTA.

Caspe, who created ABC critical favorite Happy Endings, is lifelong friends with Cahan and the duo previously teamed on NBC’s short-lived comedy Marry Me, where the latter was a supervising producer. Caspe is with WME. Cahan is with UTA.

Rannells (NBC’s The New Normal,HBO’s Girls) and Cheadle are also with UTA.

Ball Street is Showtime’s second pilot order and first comedy. It joins Ben Affleck- and Matt Damon-produced drama City on a Hill at the premium cable network.

The pilot pickup comes as Showtime is poised to launch two new half-hour series this year: White Famous and SMILF. Its half-hour comedy roster includes the final season of Episodes (currently airing) as well as season two of little-watched Dice.

Healthgrades, an online resource to provide consumers with information about physicians and hospitals, on Wednesday launched CareChats, a tool that allows encrypted text and email conversations between patients and their healthcare providers.

Developed in partnership withConversa, CareChats enables doctors and hospitals to communicate with patients outside of visits. Among its uses are management of chronic conditions, communications before and after surgery, and lifestyle health coaching.

CareChats alerts providers when intervention is required, according to the companies, and encourages patients to either book an appointment online or contact doctors directly.

“Conversa’s innovative, scalable and reliable technology delivers an innovative and meaningful way for physicians, care teams and patients to communicate outside of office visits,” said Chris Edwards, chief marketing and experience officer at Conversa.

This approach leads “to more meaningful conversations and exchanges of information and overall better care,” he told CRM Buyer.

The CareChats tool integrates with the Healthgrades CRM platform, which is used to help doctors and hospitals better manage and communicate with existing and prospective patients.

Use Cases

Several major healthcare systems have used CareChats to help doctors and other hospital staff manage patients with chronic illnesses and for other purposes.

Ochsner Health System, for example, instituted a pilot program in which primary care doctors prescribed the CareChats tool for patients with uncontrolled hypertension. The doctors were able to have real-time conversations with patients using personal medical data to drill down for the best treatment options.

Citrus Valley Health Partners used CareChats in a program to meet requirements set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ bundled payment program for total hip and knee replacements.

Growing Market

The CareChats tool reflects a trend toward automating doctor-patient communications to fill the gap between office appointments, medical procedures and testing, which is important particularly in managing chronic illness, observed Victor Kamlek, a telehealth analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

“In the predigital world, communications that were very important were not always very successful,” he told CRM Buyer.

A doctor might not be able to reach a patient after a surgical procedure to convey valuable information, for example.

The biggest obstacle to growing the doctor-patient communications market isn’t developing the technology — it’s getting the insurance industry on board, Kamlek said. “There are a lot of hurdles that need to be crossed before this is a totally accepted market.”

David Jones is a freelance writer based in Essex County, New Jersey. He has written for Reuters, Bloomberg, Crain’s New York Business and The New York Times.

Creative Misuse of RapidMiner

One of the most fun events at the RapidMiner Wisdom conference is the live predictive analytics process design competition “Who Wants to be a Data Miner?” In this competition, participants must design RapidMiner processes for a given goal within a few minutes. The tasks are related to predictive analytics and data analysis in general, but are rather uncommon. In fact, most of the challenges ask for things RapidMiner was never supposed to do.

During RapidMiner Wisdom 2016 in New York City, we again had two tasks prepared for the audience. Three brave contestants battled against each other and the clock to find the right solution (or at least something which is close enough). The first task this year was:

Create the full lyrics to “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”

According to Wikipedia, “99 Bottles of Beer is an anonymous United States folk song dating to the mid-20th century. It is a traditional song in both the United States and Canada. It is popular to sing on long trips, as it has a very repetitive format which is easy to memorize, and can take a long time to sing.”

Well, yeah. Some say that there are numerous problems with this song but this is – although a funny read – not the subject of this post. (By the way, the song has appeared many time in popular culture as well: maybe most notably, at least for some, in the game Monkey Island.)

Anyway, here is how the song goes:

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer.Take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall.98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer.Take one down and pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall.97 bottles of beer on the wall, 97 bottles of beer.Take one down and pass it around, 96 bottles of beer on the wall.…1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer.Take one down and pass it around, 0 bottles of beer on the wall.

So how can we solve the task above with RapidMiner?

Let’s start with a screenshot of the solution first:

We start with the operator “Generate Data” and generate a random data set with only 1 column and 100 examples (make the appropriate settings in the parameters of the operator). This is maybe not the most elegant way but one of the easiest ways in RapidMiner to get a data set with a specific structure and size. As a next step, we now need numbers from 1 to 100 in an extra column. Again, there are multiple ways to achieve this but the simplest is probably to use the operator “Generate ID” which is doing exactly that. We can now use “Select Attributes” and remove the columns which have been originally generated by “Generate Data”, i.e. we only keep our new “id” column. The result is a data set with 100 rows and the numbers 1 to 100 in one column named “id”.

Now all the logic happens in the next operator: “Generate Attributes”. The main problem which needs to be solved is how do we transform the sequence of numbers from 1 to 100 into a sequence from 99 to 0? Well that is easy: we can just generate a new value by subtracting the current “id” in each row from 100. At the same time we add the rest of the lyrics around those numbers. Here is how you need to set the parameters of “Generate Attributes” to achieve this:

Now you could even concatenate all these new columns into a single one if you want to. I leave it to you to figure out how. The final result after executing the process then looks like the following screenshot (only showing the beginning):

If you run the process yourself, check out the last line as well. I admit that we could handle this a bit better since the created lyrics end on: “0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around. -1 bottles of beer on the wall.” Well, there is nothing wrong with -1 bottles of beer for mathematicians and physicists but some IT systems might not like negative numbers of objects.Using RapidMiner for tasks like this is of course a bit, well, strange. But it also shows how flexible and powerful the visual approach of RapidMiner actually is. Others have created solutions in practically every programming language on earth, some shorter and some longer than others. But I would always prefer the RapidMiner solution over the code of most of them.

Below is the XML of the complete process. You can save it into an arbitrary file on your system and use “File -> Import Process…” to get it into RapidMiner.

President Reagan in his famous “Tear down this wall” address, asked for the Berlin wall to be brought down. Believing that freedom and security go together. With the same sentiment, we make a call to tear down another wall.

Tear down the wall between IT and business, and bring Business Intelligence (BI) to everyone.

Note 1: IT and the Business team of course interface on many fronts, but for this article we would focus on Business Intelligence.Note 2: The teams go by many different names. IT represents the central team, setup to meet the needs of the business user. Business User is the frontline personnel who have the need for BI, actionable data insights to run the business (could be Finance, Marketing, Executive Leadership team etc.)

I have spent time on both sides of this wall and will make some observations from my personal perspective. This is an amalgamation of the various Business/IT roles I held and not a specific role (in case my former colleagues are reading ). I realize I oversimplify and generalize a few points for the purpose of driving home the message.

Leave a comment and let us know how you have experienced the IT/Business divide yourself, pertaining to BI.

Majority of my career has been spent with one or the other business team. Here is my perspective on BI and IT’s role, based on that experience.

Low Opinion of IT: As a business user, to be blunt, I thought poorly of the central IT team. They didn’t seem to “get” my business requirements, and even if they did they were woefully slow to fulfill the request.

11 weeks: That’s the average time it takes to add a new column in an existing report

Guerilla BI: Therefore, I was largely left to fend for myself and resort to Guerilla BI. I would cobble together BI that I needed, using any means that I could. I would use a potpourri of technologies; largely reliant on Excel and it’s bag of tricks, but also heavy doses of SQL and a smattering of other tools (Tableau, Crystal, SSRS…).

Scalability Nightmares: I was actually really good at Guerilla BI, but that became part of the problem. I became a victim of my own success. My reports and spreadsheets gained in popularity and usage. But with that came the need to cater to a larger audience and increasing demands for changes/additions to reports.

Hero Syndrome: Even as the complexity grew, I could keep the system standing (barely at times) and be the hero. But, in spite of my best efforts at documenting and streamlining, a big part of my work died when I eventually left the role. It was too complex for someone else to step in and take it over. It just fell by the wayside.

For this incarnation of mine, I was part of a central BI team. Whereas as a Business Analyst I was used to flying solo (when it came to BI); in this role I was working with a team. With a team, a certain “team dynamic” emerges. Here’s what it felt like to be part of the central BI Team:

Inundated by business requests: It was death by a thousand cuts. Many small requests would together make a mountain. We started with a clean slate, but soon had lists of items we would keep pushing out from one release to the next.

Doing a thankless job: Business users often think BI is “easy”. We were at times, told this to our faces. In fact, solving some of the BI problems at an organization level can be extremely challenging (ever tried to conform a Product table across various business groups while handling slowly changing dimensions?). It was hard to impress this upon business users who only viewed BI from their perspective.

Furthermore, with BI the bar constantly gets higher. It’s like running on a treadmill, you can never make the customer happy (for too long). In one instance, we changed the refresh lag from 2.5 months (yes, that’s right) to 1 day. What did we get in reward? Complaints about the few days when the daily refresh would fail.

Mistakes get magnified: With IT/Operations if things are running smoothly, people take little notice. But if one thing goes wrong, sh*t hits the fan. You are typically noticed, only when there is bad news.

Bias towards Inaction: Instead of moving as fast as you can, the focus becomes on stability and security. And the most stable system is one that never changes. Coupled with the previous factors, an inertia of rest settles in. You find yourself pushing back on changes rather then spearheading them.

You can say that I had been in a messed up team as a Business or IT user. But I have seen this dynamic in a few different teams that I was part of. And witnessed the same tension between IT and Business, in the long list of engagements at PowerPivotPro.

It’s ironic that both BI efforts are doomed to fail. Both systems die a slow death: Guerilla BI primarily due to lack of scalability, and Corporate BI due to a lack of agility.

Both Corporate and Guerilla BI are doomed to a slow spiral of death

Which is a pity, since that results in business being run by the seat of the pants and gut-instincts rather than data-driven informed decisions. In the end it hurts the business which hurts all user groups.

I am usually wary of “technology” solutions, as all of us should be. In corporate America, you hear so many sales pitches of the form – just buy our tool and all your problems go away. But it rarely turns out that way. Same is the case with BI and the divide between IT and Business.

But I do believe that the tool has been the “missing link”. You can assemble the best team in the world, but there is little the team can accomplish without the right tools.

Which tool would you chose to dig?

You need a BI toolset that is capable but also agile and scalable. Power BI delivers on all fronts.

I will not claim that Power BI is the only such toolset in the marketplace. It is hard to separate fact from fiction in the contested word of BI. Many a toolset comes with lofty promises but fail to deliver. In that sense, I can claim that Power BI is the real deal. I’ve experienced the metamorphosis myself when adopting these tools for our business group within Microsoft. And since joining PowerPivotPro, I have catalyzed and witnessed many such transformations across various companies.

Power BI can bring both teams together – IT and Business, by empowering both communities.

Many BI tool decisions are made at the top. After polished pitches from various BI vendors, the executive, picks their favorite. What seems like a great decision at the time, usually gets nowhere in the long run.

Most BI initiatives, fail to show a positive return on investment.

The only success stories that I have seen have been built from the ground up not from the top down. As awesome as Power BI toolset is…beyond that, it’s still all about the people. You’ve overcome a hurdle by equipping your team with the right toolset. But you still need to enable them to run at top speed.

The management needs to involve all parties, the IT teams as well as the business users. Start with basic training for all, so everyone can appreciate the power and strength of Power BI. The benefits of this training are twofold.

Diffuse the Resistance to Power BI: Change is hard, even the change for good. People are naturally inclined to resist change. By involving everyone, you’re reducing the likelihood of obstructionists and naysayers. Do message Power BI as a layer on Excel or Excel++ rather than a replacement (Read how that makes a big difference)

Data Gene People: Rob anecdotally states that 1 in 16 have the “data gene”. They may come from all corners of your business, welcome them all. Basic Power BI training can help you surface the “data gene” people to the forefront, as they latch on to the power of these tools.

1 in 16 people have the Data Gene, seek them out for your Power BI team

Traditionally the “BI” teams have been placed within the IT team. This is a poor choice. Business Intelligence belongs to the business. You’re better off placing the BI team within a business unit. Or, you have another choice. Set up the BI team as a “Bridge” team between IT and your business units.

Little more than an year ago, while still at Microsoft, I heard a powerful BI transformation story. Seth Brickman used Power BI (in the shape that it existed back then: SSAS Tabular + SharePoint) to turn around BI for Holland America Cruise Line. There is a case study you can read, but I was lucky to hear Seth talk about his journey in-person at a local meetup.

One part that appealed to me, was how he described his team was setup and it’s name. They had a kick-ass name – ACE: Analytics Center of Excellence. And they were setup as a bridge between IT and the business.

Analytics Team can help bridge the divide between IT and Business Units

Consider forming an ACE team of your own, with your data gene people. The ACE team would speak both languages, business and technical. The ACE team also needs to have the blessings of senior management and be empowered to act.

The Berlin wall stood for 28 years and artificially divided populace of a centuries old city. In the years following Reagan’s speech it became increasingly inevitable that the Berlin wall would come down. It was an anachronism no longer suited for the new world. I say the same is true for the wall between IT and Business. The time has come, with tools like Power BI, for us to strike at the wall and see it crumble.

After which you would see, there is no real divide between IT and the Business user. An IT person is as invested in helping the business grow as a business user. And a business user can work shoulder to shoulder with an IT person in building their BI infrastructure.

Power On!

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